Let’s say you set out to improve your company’s customer experience to drive better organization performance (kudos to you). What will be more important in attaining that goal: exceeding customer expectations, or solving customers’ problems?
That’s the question that came to my mind after reading Robert Passikoff’s recent article on Forbes.com, “The Final Frontier: Customer Expectations.” Passikoff points to a shift in the past 15 years: customer expectations have increased significantly, rising 24 percent in all categories. That number has increased even more in the technology sector. An entire book could be written (and probably has been) on why customers’ expectations are on a sharp upward trajectory.
But my question is not the focus of Passikoff’s article. He notes that...
On a Delta flight from Chicago to Minneapolis, I caught myself thinking about customer experience - Andy Rooney style.
I confess I was not a consistent follower of Andy Rooney, the rumpled but sage commentator from the CBS news show 60 Minutes. Yet when I did catch Andy, he never failed to provoke a chuckle or a question or a smile. I like that. Hoping to work until he died, Andy very nearly did, passing away on November 4.
In honor of Andy, here is my simple story:
One afternoon in the spring of 2010, a colleague and I ducked into a fruit smoothie place in Manhattan. We had just finished a meeting and were halfway back to our hotel, put off by record breaking 95 degree heat and humidity on an afternoon in April. I settled in, opened my email and found a note from Aimee Lucas.
I’ve devoured Domino and am a follower on Twitter and am reaching out to begin a conversation….
…and I’ve been honored to say “I know Aimee Lucas” since that day. Aimee has been a force of nature at...
Photo: Aveus LLC
I recently sent out a tweet about B2B customer experience asking people to brag about their company or the work they’re doing.
The silence was deafening.
I even sent the tweet out again a few days later and still came back with nothing. It’s not often that you can’t find at least one person willing to brag about the good work they’re doing.
Frankly, I’m not all that surprised. When it comes to customer experience it’s almost as though B2B doesn’t exist. Just take a look at...
I recently had the outstanding opportunity to lead a Webinar for MarketingProfs (transparency alert: I blog for the MarketingProfs Daily Fix regularly) members on how to strengthen customer experience using four key social media platforms. For an hour-and-a-half we discussed where customers are in their experience online, what customers expect from brands on social platforms and 10 tips you can use to strengthen your customer’s experience using four social media platforms (blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube).
Here’s the full deck—it’s full of examples, case studies and, of course, 10 actionable tips.
...
Many were surprised in 2009 when Cisco decided to enter the consumer electronics market. The company shelled out $590 million in stock for Pure Digital, the makers of the affordable, consumer-friendly Flip video camera. At the time, Cisco reasoned that the acquisition would help the company’s network business because more digital content would require bigger, better networks.
It sounded like a good plan.
But a mere two years later...
With the explosion of social media tools, there are now myriad ways your customers can tell you what happened during their experience and how they feel about your organization, brand, products and services. Even voice of the customer programs are now commonplace.
Customer feedback isn’t a new concept. It’s been around since commerce began. The tools are different and more democratized now. It is easier now than ever before for the everyday customer to...
This is by no means meant as a panacea. If only it were so easy to transform a customer experience by implementing just five simple tips –voila! Our work here would be done. That certainly isn’t the case. As you know, every customer experience is a chronological process customers pass through, and there’s always room for improvement.
But it’s Friday. In honor of the end of the week, let’s take a breather from things more complex and talk about five simple things you can do today that will improve your customer experience.
1. Do what you said you were going to do.
I have seen quite a bit of conversation and research of late regarding the need for, or fast growing presence of C-level leaders accountable for customer experience strategy and objectives. I’m guessing many of you have as well.
Paul Hagen turned up our attention on the Rise of the Chief Customer Officer in his recent Forbes post. Bruce Temkin tells us that almost six out of ten companies among the 200 large...
Let’s say your CEO just tapped you on the shoulder and asked you to take on a new responsibility:
“We need you to drive customer experience strategy and actions for our organization. Define the strategy. Strengthen our customer experience. Differentiate us in the marketplace. Will you do that?”
This is becoming a more common story. More and more companies are tapping a leader or team to be accountable for customer experience strategy and execution. Some are line executives in marketing, service or operations and customer experience is folded into their work. Some lead customer experience as a discipline – much like Six Sigma – where they train a sanctioned expertise across the organization. Others, like CIGNA’s Ingrid Lindberg, are senior level internal...
